I do remember his impossibly long stride as he came down the airplane’s gangway. I remember his brown guitar case in one hand, his duffel in the other. I remember the worn leather patches on the elbows of his corduroy jacket. I remember the way his sly smile swelled into a boyish grin as he walked toward me.

I was nine years old when this happened, but I do know that this memory is almost certainly correct.

It’s almost certainly correct because I rarely visualize that moment at all, and also because I’ve never, ever written about it, or even discussed it.

So I’m sure the memory is “real,” see, because I haven’t screwed the memory up yet.

***

Tomodachi Life is a video game about avatars.

At the game’s outset you are invited either to import Miis—these are avatars usually created each by its own maker—or to recreate your family and friends entirely from memory.

You may also specify, for each of these avatars, whether that character is “related” to you and, if yes, how: You can assign relationships like “father,” “mother,” or “sibling.” (Presumably this is all to safeguard your avatar from an ugly romantic pairing.)

You can also tell the game whether an avatar is your “spouse,” but Tomodachi Life doesn’t seem to take that particular type of relationship into account—the game apparently match-makes couples at its own whim, whether or not you’re IRL-married.

Once a Mii is either imported or designed fresh, you may assign any number of characteristics to it. Perhaps she walks quickly, or talks quickly. Perhaps his gestures are broad and ebullient. Maybe she is extremely self-serious; perhaps she is “relaxed.” You can also tweak settings until an avatar’s vocal tone, timbre, and cadence are exactly correct. The avatar goes on to read game text aloud in its bizarre digitized voice.

Once you’ve assigned X-many values, Tomodachi Life evaluates the avatar’s “personality” using a rubric resembling the Myers-Briggs. In this way, one friend—a slow-moving, serious woman—is a “confident brainiac.” Another—a quick-moving fellow with a flair for the dramatic—is an “outgoing” showboat.

***

“But Ted,” I teased my fiance, “this is the old you.”

“Don’t delete me!” Ted cried. “Didn’t you fall in love with the ‘old me’ when we first met?”

At the beginning of my Tomodachi Life, there were only two Mii avatars in my “MiiMaker,” one of whom was a thinner, clean-shaven Ted.

I initially hadn’t realized I could import more Mii avatars through the 3DS’s Streetpass Plaza; now I had two Teds to contend with. There was the out-of-date Ted I’d downloaded from our WiiU a year earlier, and then there was the new, up-to-date Ted I’d streetpassed just this week.

And since Old Ted’s avatar and mine were the only two avatars on the island at first, my Tomodachi Life “lookalike”—the game explicitly refers to your doppelgaenger as a “lookalike”—had already begun to fall in love with the Ted of Last Year.

“Fuck it,” I told real-life living-with-me Ted. “I’m just gonna delete Old Ted. While I still have a chance, you know?”

“Don’t do that!” Ted insisted, suddenly and weirdly attached to the Old Ted Avatar.

“Look,” I replied lightly, “I’m sure she’ll eventually fall in love with New Ted.” Here I meant, once I’d deleted the old WiiU avatar, my “lookalike” would fall in love with the next-newest cast member, Ted From a Week Ago. After all, I’d marked this character as a “spouse,” too.

She didn’t.

Instead, my doppelgaenger wanted to romance two of her male colleagues. “No, no, no!” I shouted at the tiny screen. “This is all wrong! This is so wrong!”

The dissonance didn’t end there. One avatar, one of my best guy friends in real life, insisted on having a haircut. “I’m tired of my hair,” his avatar harrumphed.

NO, I told the game.

No! Because my friend doesn’t need a haircut, or if I do give him one, how is he supposed to resemble himself?

I dressed another avatar in clothes she would approximately wear. “She doesn’t like it,” the game grumbled at me. I shopped for clothes until I found an ensemble she’d hate.

“She loves it!” the game told me giddily.

***

In-game I can set another avatar as my “father,” “mother,” or “sibling.” But in life, I can’t. Oh, I could fudge the facts a little, sure. I could invent a little avatar of my best friend and call her my sibling for the hell of it. I could make avatars of Ted’s parents and recast them as mine.

Sometimes, in-game, I wonder how—if I were made to try it—how I might design an avatar of my birth father.

I don’t remember his face very well. I do remember his ash-brown hair, his green eyes, and his eyelashes, which were long and black and curled like a cartoon’s. I remember that he was grand and lanky, at least to a nine-year-old girl. I do remember his twice-broken nose.

But, trickily, I don’t actually remember what any of these details look like. Rather, they’re ideas of memories. They’re things I remember remembering.

Now, when I try to remember the details of his face, there is no memory. Instead, I find my head filled with simple mental sentences—“He has green eyes.” “He has ash-brown hair”—and the still-frame images I ought to have of him are instead replaced with entire spoken paragraphs.

***

There is a picturebook on my shelf, ‘Stories Every Child Should Know’, copyrighted 1936. It is bound in fine blue fabric; its title is printed in barely-faded gilt. My adoptive mother used to read to me from it because her mother used to read aloud from it, too.

Ted never had a chance to know my adoptive parents. He’s never met any of my family. I sometimes joke that, as far as he knows, I made them all up. It’s a sick joke: He moved into my childhood home with me, so that we’re surrounded by photographs of them, and books.

I opened the picturebook to its first page and, automatically, Ted began to read aloud.

“You can overwrite it someday,” I conceded, “if we ever have children. I mean, we’ll have to. We’ll have to read out loud. But I’m not ready for that.

“But also,” and I started to laugh, “also, you’re reading it wrong.”

***

As I’ve uploaded my friends’ avatars to Tomodachi Life, I keep guessing at the characteristics I think they might give themselves. “How would this person describe herself?” I am always wondering.

Still, I am acutely aware that I am the one who is, in fact, authoring their personalities.

To my credit, they seem enough like themselves. My close friend Daphny, according to the game software, is a “trendsetter,” which she really is. A friendly colleague was designated as an “outgoing” “leader,” which I liked for him. Ted was given the “showboat” personality, which I guess is sort of true. (“I love being the center of attention!” my fiance’s avatar shouted at me. It rang tinny: Maybe Ted does love being the center of attention, but he would never say so.)

As I imported a friendly acquaintance’s avatar, though—and this avatar belonged to a someone I haven’t seen in at least a year—I began to wonder if I had his “personality” wrong. And if I did have his personality wrong, wasn’t that… unfair? Sinister, almost?

Because, if I do have him all wrong, I’m memorizing this backward version of him, cementing that version of him in my head, instead of knowing him for the way he really is.

I began to overthink it. I began to worry.

In a sense, aren’t I doing that to every friend in Tomodachi Life? I am secretly writing my own mental sentences about people I’ve met, and I am making those sentences permanent.

It’s almost like when someone appears to you in a dream, and he says something wrong, and you’re angry at him the next morning even though he never really said that thing.

***

My adoptive mother appears in every single dream I have. Whenever I wake up, if I can remember the dream, I make sure to remind myself that I was the one who wrote both halves of our conversation.

***

I do remember the way, as he disembarked the plane, my birth father’s stride lengthened. His little smirk broadened into a grin.

I remember his smile because one of his front teeth was missing.

That one excrutiating detail changed his appearance so much, somehow. He looked so different to me. I think I must have taken a step back.

My birth father stopped several feet away from me. He stood there motionless. His smile faltered.

I remember this, not because I can picture him without his teeth, but because I remember my sudden, deep embarrassment.

I remember my birth-father pausing in his walk toward me. He stood there, silent. Finally he said, “Daddy got some teeth knocked out.” I nodded, and we left the airport that way.

In one particular memory, I can see a gold cross earring dangling from my birth father’s ear. It is a half-inch long, gold-plated, jittering from his earlobe and catching the light.

I probably remember his earring because I asked him why he was wearing it. He told me it was because we were going to church. It was his church earring.

***

Tomodachi Life is a game about avatars.

More important, it’s about the avatars you create. It’s entirely about how you choose to remember others.

The problem with nonfiction writing—the problem with remembering anything, ever—is that, with each act of remembering, the photograph might fade. With enough remembering, the mental image dissolves completely.

With enough remembering, I am left with an oversimplification, an abstract map of a memory. I am left with a mess of so many sentences about a person, with just a cartoon of a face.

I cannot remember my birth father’s face.

I can remember specific details, but none of these is a salient fact about his appearance. Every feature is a mistake. I’m left with elbow-patches on his sports jacket, his boyish, toothless grin, and that’s it. That’s all.

Recently, online, I picked a battle that isn’t mine to pick. Relief finally came in the form of an email. “My wife and I are Quaker,” the letter-writer explained; I was immediately overwhelmed.

My mother never identified Quaker as such, but when she was new to Christianity she was mentored by a Quaker, by a man called John Steiner. She spoke of this person a lot. She took certain ideals to heart and, although she would certainly tell you that her message, as transmitted to me, got all mixed up, some ideals really did glom onto me. I am anti-war; I am terribly conflict-averse; I believe in compassion and inclusion. I still identify as Christian—and make no mistake, I have several crises of faith in a single day—but none of those crises has anything to do with whether God, as I interpret Him, composed human beings lovingly in His own image. (Mostly my crises are about me being a shitty person. I am trying to learn to become more patient with myself.)

Principally, though, I am terrified of my own anger. Very few people have witnessed it, but they can tell you it’s an ugly, remarkable thing, a thing that gets away from me before I can grab back onto it and rein it to shore again. Like most people, I figure, my anger usually has something to do with an issue of “justice.” When I have been at my very angriest, my mother used to sigh—oh, my mother!—and warn me, “Jenny, don’t talk to people that way.” Now, here in her shadow, I am beginning to think she is right.

I understand the argument against “tone arguments.” I also hate tone arguments. It’s usually an unfair thing, this gambit is, demanding the other person sacrifice all emotion—indeed, all humanity—for the sake of being “calm,” “reasonable,” “rational.” These are loaded terms, denying a speaker all the emotion—which is, absolutely, another type of data, what we call “experiential data”—he or she is feeling. Women especially are socialized to couch their assertions of opinion with words like “I am beginning to think” or “sometimes I get the feeling,” which are all ways of preemptively apologizing for holding any opinion or valueset at all. Even now I’m using a type of passive speech, as a defense mechanism, certainly, so you will not feel like hitting me.

What horror movies and video games share in common

Late last night I tried my hand at posting to Medium for the first time. It was something I was originally going to post here but, you know, it ended up over there instead, so whatever. The blarticle at Medium is called “On Consuming Media Responsibly,” and it’s all about my love of violent, misogynistic horror movies. I’m a student of the form, I get overexcited when a movie tries anything new, and I also enjoy movies that suck and do everything wrong. (The greatest insult, I always warn, is just being boring, and even then I don’t mind being bored when a movie is otherwise doing good work.)

I bring up my horror movie fetish because Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian is currently in the throes of the usual gamer backlash, which is really alarming, because she isn’t asking anyone to give anything up. No one is saying “video games are bad, burn them”; Sarkeesian is simply focusing a critical or analytical lens on video games, in a way that is surprisingly nonconfrontational and not even particularly judgemental. Well. All my thoughts are actually already in the Medium link, so check it out.

Medium as a medium

I really like what Medium and Zeen are both trying to do—but I have to wonder whether content creators and distributors are on the cusp of getting all pinboarded and Tumblr’d out. These are platforms that kind of get their content for free, to which I’m opposed, but they also “curate” what becomes visible, so a newcomer has a much better shot at being read. This isn’t a new publishing model, no, but it does work.

What’s most interesting about Medium, though, is you can invite other collaborators to make edits before publishing, and then once it’s published readers can comment in the margins. A lot of this ends up being minor recommendations and tweaks, so the work kind of turns into this living document. Which is weird—an article might look completely different if you decide to read it a day later—but as a result people have been really responsive even in other channels, especially on Twitter.

Man. Man. I don’t think I’d ever used the word “gender” in a piece of writing until 2010. Wow! What a strange time for me, too. I was three months’ out of my six-year on-and-off romance/cohabitation thing, very freshly single and really bumbling around, extremely “over” writing about video games, and meanwhile I’d begun reading a lot about learned helplessness. You know, just for funsies. Er.

Yep, before 2010, I’d never used the word “gender.” What a dumb word.

Actually, that might be a lie. In school I did write a paper about women who join subcultures: it focused on Flora Belle Jan, the self-identified “flapper” journalist, and also, of all people, Mimi Thi Nguyen, who was a punk zinester and music journalist in the ‘90s. I likened both women to the not-very-fictional Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans, a woman who meticulously works to desex herself (Kerouac tells us she has short hair like a man’s, and that she wears dress slacks), all to be taken seriously as a Beat writer. So I bet the word “gender” must’ve snuck into that college essay somehow.

In Subterraneans Mardou is driven to the brink of her own wits, suddenly all too aware that she is, now and forever, ostracized by her chosen “subculture,” some niche group with which she had once so identified. Jan and Nguyen experienced similar psychological breaking points and very willfully severed themselves from their own established writing careers. In fact, I’m sure in my paper I accused them of “fleeing.”

It was kind of a weird paper to write for Asian-American history class. It was kind of weird that I took the class at all—but I needed a history credit to graduate! Oh, well. I think I got a B.

It would also be weird if, six years after having been suddenly hot-dropped into video games journalism, I were to—very abruptly, and with a personal sense of finality and closure—acknowledge some of my own patterns of experience.

Its writer, Anna Breslaw, opens her piece with a quick hat-tip to a 1995 computer game called Chop Suey, which I’ve mentioned on Infinite Lives thrice before and am about to mention again. That’s because it is a great game that isn’t mentioned often enough. I’m trying to change the world, here, people.

But yes, our coincident timing is totally awkward, ha ha. Earlier in the week I’d snuck a bunch of Chop Suey playthrough videos onto YouTube, hoping to jog memories. (For a long time the only footage of the game available online was Bruno’s.)

But also, I was already laboring over this Chop Suey retrospective. Please do read it! It is a tragedy Chop Suey isn’t better remembered: it was celebrated in its day, and with reason. But most people did not use the Internet in 1995, which is to say, Chop Suey and all its accolades have not been very well preserved. (Duncan’s extraordinarily bizarre death doesn’t help anything; it’s almost impossible to discuss Chop Suey without mentioning that part, too, and the game is thusly difficult to google.)

The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were such a great time for edutainment, and while the medium isn’t entirely dead (your child’s school computer lab may yet have Storybook Weaver!), I do think the middle-’90s’ “girl game” craze went a long way in murdering it. Worse, the “girl game” genre probably scared a generation of woulda-been PC gamers away.

Most girls did not actually play girl games in the ‘90s, of course, because most “girl games” were stupid. Girls are not idiots. Girls are not boy-crazy strumpets. Girls are 8. Girls are 9. Girls play Oregon Trail and You Don’t Know Jack. Can people not picture 9-year olds?

This is what girls really want: girls want horse training simulations; they like fortune-telling; girls read spy stories and tales of adventure and daring; girls enjoy the Super Nintendo version of Mario Kart and computer games about being in outer space. Girls would like chemistry lab sets for Christmas, or planetariums and cheap telescopes, or periscopes and walkie-talkies. Girls like crafts. Girls like Minecraft! Girls like dolls, toy theaters, replicas, scale miniatures, and “character editors.” Girls like She-Ra. Girls like Labyrinth. Girls like sci-fi, unless it’s just a bunch of dweeby dudes standing around talking into their own lapels. Girls like pirates and especially stowaways, and especially stowaways who look like boys but are secretly girls. Girls like scrappy heroines—resourceful, freckle-nosed troublemakers—heroines with scraped knees and scuffed shoes. Girls are impatient to learn something new, and if you don’t give them brain-food they eventually wander off. There! There is your blueprint for a “girl game.”

So, yes, Breslaw’s and my Chop Suey -themed posts both went up on May 12, both incorporating that same playthrough footage. Oops! How embarrassing. It’s a little like arriving at a dance in matching dresses.

Fortunately, the dresses aren’t identical! (Ha, ha, ha!) Breslaw’s piece isn’t about Chop Suey at all, thank goodness. It’s actually about a new project called FEMICOM, an online museum that aspires to catalogue and archive every manner of game-for-girls. This is noble work—it’s why I’ve made Chop Suey evangelism one of my pet hobbies, actually—exactly because the project illustrates the enormity of the gulf between “this game or toy is edifying” and “why would you ever give your child that.”

The nicest thing about seeing this article about “girl games” on Jezebel, though? It’s elicited all these comments, where the readers themselves are essentially sorting the lady-treasures from the lady-tripe. One reader mentions Heavenly Sword for PS3. Oh, boy, do girls love that game. (Because we love third-person beat-em-ups starring She-Ra! It’s pretty much the only game you should give an adult woman. There, I said it.)

Other notable “girl-friendly” game mentions: Sim City. The Sims. Little Big Planet. Metroid. Zelda. Carmen Sandiego. Ecco. Pokemon. No One Lives Forever. Nancy Drew games. Street Fighter, Soul Calibur. Doom, Marathon, BioShock. Killer7 (most girls do really well with first-person rail-shooters; this has something to do with spatial attention). Final Fantasy. Fallout. Diablo. Starcraft. Mass Effect. Star Wars KOTOR. Guild Wars. Skyrim. Braid. Age of Empires. Civilization. Portal and its sequel. (“I loved that about Portal…really the only way you knew the character was female was from the brief glimpses you got of yourself if you lined Portals up right. Her female-ness wasn’t a factor one way or the other in the game.” Thank you, Susan Fry! I agree.)

See, this is why I get so frustrated with the whole conversation about games for girls. If you’d tried to design an ideal non-people based game for little girl me, it would have featured dinosaurs fighting each other, not dolphins swimming around being pretty.

I picked a pretty opportune moment to start writing for Unwinnable: it was the site’s “Death Week,” and if there is one thing I love to think about, it’s death.

One night I finally settled on an idea for “Death Week,” drank some beers, and wrote an article. It’s like a much shorter version of some of the longest articles I’ve done, so it was an interesting experiment. I really enjoyed writing it! I was comparatively concise!

You can read it at its real home, Unwinnable, or you might read it at Kotaku, where the heroic Kirk Hamilton has republished it. I recommend reading it at Unwinnable if only because I wrote it specifically for Unwinnable, but at Kotaku there is the benefit of the influx of comments. I love this. I already know what my article sounds like, so the real interest, for me, will be in what others say. When there are all these simultaneities in experience, I get really happy. So far the comments are really inspiring.

Finally—and I mentioned his article before, but—Mark Serrels’ piece for Kotaku Australia went a long way in influencing the piece I wrote, too. When I described his article last week, I started talking about my fear of kids, and this has probably continued to haunt me till now.

And I enjoyed the post on its own terms because, let’s face it, it is filed under a blog category titled “Fan Service.” So the post was very conspicuously directed at Kotaku’s “old guard”: here, of course, I mean the Internet’s loathsomely entitled commenters, who are mostly white and heterosexual, and male, who might fulfill almost every possible permutation of “ordinary” and “normal,” and who tend to shriek for the smelling salts anytime a lady or queer struggles into their line-of-sight. (This is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate, yes, yes, and Gawker’s own comments sections do a bang-up job of perpetuating it, not for any fault of its editors.) But let’s be coolheaded. When you deal with that type of readership, you have to be very caring and compassionate and patient, even when you don’t want to be, and so you assert things in a debilitatingly accessible way.

“What’s happening to my precious Kotaku?” the old guard must have screamed through the tips of its nervous little fingers, illuminated as one in the glow of the laptop’s screen.

So Johnson defended all of Kotaku’s editorial decisions, and his argument was compelling, and if you aren’t going to just look at the post I’d better do my best to recount it:

Johnson did anticipate that some readers would have difficulty reconciling Kotaku’s overt legacy of, say, cosplay galleries, with Kotaku’s now-implicit stance on genderjamming. So naturally, he combined both arguments into a single blog entry. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried. Listen boys, he might as well have said, you can screech about “what’s with the scary minorities on my video game blog all of a sudden” as much as you like, but it’s about as ‘normal’ to love tits wrapped in cosplay as it is to be ‘into’ anything else. That was his argument to these folks in a nutshell.

And Johnson posited this assertion in a way that heteronormative fellows who have never had their realities rocked might understand, and he pursued his argument to its logical conclusion, which is that we all fetishize something—like it or not, I’ve seen Dan Savage make this exact same argument in his columns about sex and love—and maybe you fetishize cars, computers, video games, politics, girls dressed up as Soul Calibur characters, chubby people, Japanese things, French things, your own sex, whips and chains, quoting Jesus when you do it, whatever. And if you’re fetishizing—as opposed to exoticizing, right—what’s ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ is kind of beside the point. You’re into what you’re into, and that is in some way neurologically hardwired.

Besides! Johnson sagely added, the site is actually called Kotaku, which riffs on the word otaku, which lends the notion that it’s, uh, cool to be into whatever you’re into. So let’s all be good people; let’s not fracture in dissent. Thanks!

Johnson posted all of this, not as an editor, but as a moderator. He explained all the sides of everything that has ever been, ever, just as well as he could. Maybe it got a little mangled in translation. Sure.

He probably posted all this and then ducked for cover, and with plenty of reason: every pocket of enthusiast readership he could have humanly offended was sure to let him know.

Reading the MetaFilter thread—which took me at least a day, because I needed to read very carefully—clarified a lot of concepts. It was, indeed, the conversation no one expected. Measured and moderated in a neutral court, this dialogue did a lot of work for me that I never could have done on my own in any good time.

I know not everyone will be able to do all the necessary reading, or even make total linear sense of the back-and-forth there, because who has the time, and maybe that really has been the issue from the start.

I get angry, but not that often. Or maybe I am angry a lot. But in my adult life I have always stepped lightly around my own opinions. That timorousness has helped maintain a lot of friendships that might otherwise not have lasted. My best childhood friend and I, for instance, have completely opposite, rabidly passionate beliefs. We have carefully cultivated a friendly and loving political distance. She and I understand the stakes. We know that, if we begin those conversations, we won’t stop, our feelings will be hurt, and no one will win. That is why she is my best friend. I have the same relationship with, you know, my mother.

Maybe nobody needs to know everything I’m thinking at any given moment, or how I feel about health reform or gun laws or Larry Elder (it’s complicated). Maybe there are some fiercely held opinions I’d do just as well to keep under my hat, just as I’d do well not to march up to a friendly acquaintance and scream “I hate you and everything you stand for.” No, I tiptoe, genuinely working hard to not alienate my fellow humankind. There’s no reason, ordinarily, for me to take up arms and get in your face and go THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.

I bet I’ll come to regret this, but I’m going to tell you a secret I’ve never been comfortable with sharing before this moment: I’m a huge asshole.

I mean, I’m the biggest asshole I know. That’s because I barely give a shit about hurt feelings, because I’m a narcissistic fuck who is the center of her own universe. Until now I’ve tried to keep my being an asshole under wraps, but the sheer effort takes a lot out of me. If I troll the Internet, I’m careful to use an anonymous name that won’t get traced back to me. I fight myself to not use slurs: for instance, I don’t call things “gay” anymore, because my gay friends all convinced me to stop. I’m really careful to not call anything “retarded” if I’m talking to someone who knows someone who is retarded, but sometimes it slips out anyway. I’m doing my very best to hide my interior asshole from the lot of you nice people.

But it’s time for me, finally, to trudge out of my flamboyantly asshole closet and come clean with you.

"When Abbie Heppe submitted her review of Metroid: Other M (2 out of 5 stars) for G4," Michael Abbott writes, "I’m guessing she hit the SEND button and ran for cover." Look, for me, this is personal: my review of the Wii title ‘Boogie’ was second on the scene—and my negative review followed what may well have eventually been the Internet’s only glowing review of the title—and I did feel that maybe the masses were unduly wrathful with me and my gendered byline. Also, someone wrote that I "obviously hate fun," which made me SO MAD, because I am a karaoke girl through-and-through. Anyway. Here, Mr. Abbott carefully criticizes the critic’s critics.

Ben Weber writes, "My system attempts to … [incorporate] parameter-tweaking into procedural content generation. The system creates new levels on the fly in response to the current performance of the player."

A tenderly youthful eighteen-year old, as a fledgling retro gamer, pledges to begin attempting play at games that are totally way older than 18. I know I started really playing 2600 games with any kind of fervor at age 18—and many of those games were older than I!—so of course I wish young Ryan all best in his endeavors.

Commissioned by Channel 4’s Alice Taylor and written by RPS’s Kieron Gillen, this free-to-play point-and-click adventure game has great writing, terrific (if scene-chewing) acting, and high production values. A review at Ars Technica.